The main room was almost exactly as Ginta remembered it. A communal table, a battered couch, a pair of posters on the wall — one of a busty, leggy, blonde model wearing little more than a tiger-striped scarf around her hips, and one in black and white, of a broad-shouldered, muscle-ripped man, wearing nothing but a come-hither grin and a glistening of sweat. The fact that the photo was cropped just below his navel was the only thing that saved it from indecency. In the green phosphor glow of the light sticks it just looked sad.

“Ryouma and Hiroyuki put up the woman,” Ginta said, going to stand next to Kakashi and his dogs. “And Arata put up the man. He said it was an oppressive work environment or something like that, if there wasn’t some eye-candy for him.” He stared at the posters a moment more, then turned away. “I heard both of them are stationed at another border post now.”

Kakashi quirked the faintest ghost of a smile at the posters and trailed his hand over the table. There was a news magazine there, nine months out of date, and Arata’s old sliding blocks puzzle. Kakashi picked it up but didn’t try to work it before he turned towards the hall leading to sleeping quarters.

Ginta hesitated, studying the door to the kitchen, then turned wearily and followed Kakashi. He wished they hadn’t come here. It was like walking into a mausoleum, though only one of the former occupants was feared dead. The most important former occupant.

“Everyone shared quarters,” he said quietly when he caught up. Kakashi was standing at the door to the residents’ bunks, probably navigating by scent. The door across from it led to the transient bunks, where Ginta and his mission partners, and any other ninja passing through this station had slept.

The room still held a pair of bunk beds, stripped of bedding. The lower mattress on the left — the one that had been Hiroyuki’s — was stained dark rust brown where someone had bled copiously. For a dizzyingly egotistic moment, Ginta remembered his last mission here and wondered if it was his own blood.

Probably.

That was the mission that had led to this bunker being shut down, after all.

Kakashi was still as a rooted sapling, inhaling scents Ginta couldn’t begin to perceive, with his head turned towards the same bed, eyes focused on the upper bunk. Ryouma’s bunk.

“That was his bed, yeah,” Ginta said, slipping past him. “Looks like they mostly cleaned the place out, though.”

Moving into the room, he found only a torn and crumpled gossip rag stuffed between the mattress and springs on the top right bunk. He pulled it out and stared the empty-eyed smile of the actress on the cover. “This was Daisuke’s. He was the youngest of Ryouma’s team. Everyone teased him.”

And why was he telling Kakashi any of this? The room felt oppressive.

“We should check out the other room. There’s not much left here.”